Summer is strawberry time. Not the hothouse kind. These are from the U-pick at Swanton Farms in Pescadero. The trouble with U-pick is it’s so much fun that you pick more than you can eat. And after sharing with neighbors and friends, we were still eating them at breakfast, lunch and dinner, in shakes, salads and by themselves.
Here’s the bowl of strawberries I ate and drew.
Sometimes, I paint something over and over, in quick succession, because there’s bits of every piece I want to change once I do it. Take #1, I thought, lacked highlights on the berries, particularly the one in the foreground. (Yes, my photo shows it didn’t catch the light at all, but still, I would have liked to leave some indication of the little seeds on it.)
So here is Take 2, perhaps going too far the other way? Little bitty spots everywhere?
Take 3 didn’t solve any of my earlier issues but was fun to do. Paint first, line later with a watersoluble pencil before the paint was totally dry.
In retrospect I like bits and pieces of all 3 pieces. But I can see why I wanted to redo them too. Do you do this?: Redraw/repaint things over and over in quick succession? If you do, what do you do with all the pieces you end up with? My wonderful flat files that store all my work that’s not in sketchbooks are getting to where they’re filling up… These little pieces should be finding new homes, so I can keep painting!
Great to see a series of pieces of the same subject, and to read your thoughts about the process. And I love the idea of adding soluble pencil lines to damp paint.
On Thu, Jun 8, 2017 at 9:31 AM, Sketch Away: Travels with my sketchbook wrote:
> Suhita Shirodkar posted: “Summer is strawberry time. Not the hothouse > kind. These are from the U-pick at Swanton Farms in Pescadero. The trouble > with U-pick is it’s so much fun that you pick more than you can eat. And > after sharing with neighbors and friends, we were still eating ” >
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It’s a great lesson, to see the change with pencil added, and change over successive sketches. They get better!
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I love your strawberries! I do the same sketch over and over too. Different styles, adding pencils, charcoal etc. I make them postcard-size and send them out to friends.
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that’s a lovely idea, Toni! I work bigger than that to work loosely, but I bet you I could mail those sketches out as oversized postcards…
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Bring a stack to the Symposium and sell them!
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🙂 I’m happy to sell work most times ( and I do, when someone sees a piece on the blog or instagram and sends me a message about it) but not at a UsK event: that’s purely volunteer stuff, all of it: no one gets paid, not the organizers, not the teachers either. That’s part of the beauty of it.
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These are really gorgeous, little masterpieces.
Extra work become cards for friends – a personal touch for those who mean so much to me.
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Especially loving that last one!
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Take 1 is very James Reid. I like that it reads well without the linework.
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